<p>President Obama spoke at a town hall in Buenos Aires on Wednesday and told the crowd not to concern themselves about whether the capitalist or socialist theory is correct. Apparently our President doesn&#8217;t realize the most powerful nation on earth was built on capitalist principles, he advised that people just decide which one works.</p>
<p>Despite this statement, Obama went on to contradict himself saying that the best economies are those that are rooted in a market-based system. Then, he flipped back to the other side to praise President Castro and the work he has done in Cuba. Here is a partial transcript of his speech:</p>
<p><strong>PRESIDENT OBAMA:</strong> I guess to make a broader point, so often in the past there&rsquo;s been a sharp division between left and right, between capitalist and communist or socialist. And especially in the Americas, that&rsquo;s been a big debate, right? Oh, you know, you&rsquo;re a capitalist Yankee dog, and oh, you know, you&rsquo;re some crazy communist that&rsquo;s going to take away everybody&rsquo;s property.</p>
<p>And I mean, those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don&rsquo;t have to worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory &mdash; you should just decide what works.</p>
<p>And I said this to President Castro in Cuba. I said, look, you&rsquo;ve made great progress in educating young people. Every child in Cuba gets a basic education &mdash; that&rsquo;s a huge improvement from where it was. Medical care &mdash; the life expectancy of Cubans is equivalent to the United States, despite it being a very poor country, because they have access to health care. That&rsquo;s a huge achievement. They should be congratulated. But you drive around Havana and you say this economy is not working.</p>
<p>It looks like it did in the 1950s. And so you have to be practical in asking yourself how can you achieve the goals of equality and inclusion, but also recognize that the market system produces a lot of wealth and goods and services. And it also gives individuals freedom because they have initiative.</p>
<p>And so you don&rsquo;t have to be rigid in saying it&rsquo;s either this or that, you can say &mdash; depending on the problem you&rsquo;re trying to solve, depending on the social issues that you&rsquo;re trying to address what works.</p>
<p>And I think that what you&rsquo;ll find is that the most successful societies, the most successful economies are ones that are rooted in a market-based system, but also recognize that a market does not work by itself. It has to have a social and moral and ethical and community basis, and there has to be inclusion. Otherwise it&rsquo;s not stable.</p>
<p>And it&rsquo;s up to you &mdash; whether you&rsquo;re in business or in academia or the nonprofit sector, whatever you&rsquo;re doing &mdash; to create new forms that are adapted to the new conditions that we live in today.</p>